The Rick Steves thing doesn’t count, I phoned that in. But it’s just been that this last semester there hasn’t been that much to write about. Obama won the election; Sarah Palin was returned to the padded cell that is Alaska; John McCain seems to have rid himself of the Venom Symbiote; Scott McClellan revealed once and for all that Fox News was not only a Bush shill but a Bush mouthpiece, and there was Peace and Harmony Throughout the Land. Mostly. Enough.

There wasn’t much to be enraged about, really. The few rabid conservatives still showing their pasty faces were like amusing court jesters, or Vegas contortionists – a little disturbing, a little macabre, but ultimately hilarious. I mean, have you seen those people on Morning Joe? They’re a freaking laugh riot! There’s that blonde one whose father is an economist, but she doesn’t know anything about anything; and Pat Buchanan comes on sometimes to kill hippies live-on-air, and OMG, that stupid jerky one who pretends he used to be a Congressman? Joe? He’s better than Stephen Colbert.

But my ire has slowly but surely begun to rise. It all began with this Rhodes Scholar, right here:

Michelle Bachmann, fucking insane

Does anyone else remember that episode of How I Met Your Motherwhere the subplot was all about not dating girls with “crazy eyes?” That’s what Michelle Bachmann makes me think of. Crazy. Eyes. Like she wants to seduce me in an elevator and then kill my rabbit. Just sayin’.

Anyway, not too long ago, Bachmann made the following statement, which, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making up:

“The Founding Fathers fought against taxation without representation.

Today we have taxation with representation.

I wonder what they’d think of that!”

(crowd goes wild)

Much as I hate to burst her crazy little bubble, I gotta say: I think the Founding Fathers would be pretty goddamn psyched about taxation with representation, considering that the right to it was what spurred them to revolution.

I don't even know what this means

But the Republican base, as usual, is much more interested in style than substance.

“Tea Parties” have “spontaneously” “sprung up” “all over the country.”

Translation: “Uninformed protests” have been “organized and publicized by Fox News” “in cities in which they could scrape up a couple hundred, or in some cases, a couple dozen, people.” (more…)

On the way home from Thanksgiving dinner at Calvin’s house, positively filled with the four Thanksgiving foods I eat – mashed potatoes, turkey, pecan pie, and bread – I observed the lighted houses, trees, and plastic life-sized nativity scenes many of my neighbors had erected (some as early as Monday) and realized that I have been falling down in my sacred duty as an American: here it is the day after Thanksgiving – 31 days, 6 hours until Christmas – and I haven’t even begun to think about that most excitingly commercial holiday. Why, Wal-Mart, ever on the ball, had their Christmas decor up on October 31! What is wrong with me?

So, to get into the swing of things, I lit a fire, made some hot chocolate, and put on some Christmas music.

And that’s when it hit me: a lot of this music is awful.

Dave Barry, funnyman extraordinaire, one wrote a series of columns called “The Bad Song Survey.” He asked his readers to write in with their nominations for the worst song of all time, and he was flooded with responses. “Song badness is an issue Americans care deeply about,” he wrote.

I could not agree more, Dave. Which is why I extend a similar challenge to my readers: Please, between now and December 24, post a comment to this post with your nomination for the worst Christmas song of all time, and on Christmas, I’ll combine them all into one post with the winner (determined by most votes): The Worst Christmas Song of All Time. Here are the specific instructions for the contests:

Contest 1: The Worst Christmas Song of All Time:

1) Pick what you think is the worst Christmas song ever. Use any criteria you want – level of sappiness; lyric badness; poor rendition; or annoying melody/harmony.

2) Specifying which contest you are voting in, post a comment to this post and give a detailed explanation of your decision. Quotation of lyrics is encouraged.

3) Feel free to rant, but please, keep it clean. I don’t have a problem with cussing altogether, but it usually isn’t necessary. Be smart, use your discretion, and help me maintain the integrity of the blog. For more info on this, check my comments policy on the right-hand side of the blog.

Contest 2: The Worst Christmas Movie of All Time

1) Pick what you think is the worst Christmas movie ever. ANY MOVIE: made for TV, theatrical release, classic. Use any criteria you want – level of sappiness; stupidity of plot; poor acting; inanity of lines/script; poor message or total lack of message.

2) Specifying which contest you are voting in, post a comment to this post and give a detailed explanation of your decision.

3) Feel free to rant, but please, keep it clean. I don’t have a problem with cussing altogether, but it usually isn’t necessary. Be smart, use your discretion, and help me maintain the integrity of the blog. For more info on this, check my comments policy on the right-hand side of the blog.

Have fun, everybody, and later I’ll post what I, PenguinDust, consider to be the worst Christmas movie and song.

As I think I’ve explained before, I read my local college newspaper in order that I might be amused by the police briefs (“Suspicious service dog interrupts IM fields”) ; I do not read it in hopes of seeing in blinding relief, everything that is wrong with our society.

And yet they continue to surprise me.

On September 24, they ran an opinion article (purportedly) about how political correctness had gone too far. I remember reading it and raising my eyebrows skyward, because the whole thing was a fear/ignorance induced hate-fest on Muslims who, he asserted, wanted to kill us all; this seemed especially uncalled for considering that this guy obviously represents Christianity, a religion which I can define and decry in three words: “Puritanism,” “Native Americans,” and “Crusades.” Last time I checked, the Christians (although not, I willingly concede, Christ himself) honed, perfected, and elevated to an art form the concept of killing people who don’t worship your god – whether by lighting them on fire (Puritans) or by inflicting massive genocide (upon Native Americans during the pre-Colonial era and upon Arabic peoples during the Crusades).

If you’re interested in the actual content of the article, all you need know was that it was similar in tone to the stupidity displayed here. One of his points was that, apparently, unbeknownst to me, all American schools everywhere, were forcing children to don Muslim attire and read the Koran aloud. This seemed like an interesting claim, but I had a class to get to, and I promptly forgot. Until today, that is.

The other regular author of the Opinion column (they rotate, not unlike Anna Quinlan and George F. Will in Newsweek, only considerably less talented) used his space today to write an entire column about the Muslim column, calling it a “hate article against Muslims in the cloak of a dislike for all things PC.”

He proceeded, in his bumbling, vaguely literate, college-paper way, to trash the entire article and its author, while, all the while, noting that it was perfectly constitutionally acceptable for him to be a bottom-feeding ethnocentric prick (I’m paraphrasing here). (more…)

Here is what I don’t understand: why is Martin Luther King, Jr. heralded as the first leader of the civil rights movement while we, as a society, ignore Booker T. Washington?

Don’t get me wrong, King was a great man, and a huge and important figure in the movement. He just wasn’t the first.

Dr. Washington was born as a slave in 1856 Virginia, to a slave mother and a white father he never really knew. Freed by the emancipation proclamation at the age of nine, he moved with his family to West Virginia, where he began to attend school when he could, and learned to read and write. He pursued education hungrily, became a teacher, and eventually became the head of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institution (still around today as Tuskegee University).

He soon became one of the best known representatives of the black community, traveling the country, speaking for and about his race, and using his extensive and powerful contacts to establish new educational opportunities for blacks. His philosophy was that all black people could achieve equality through education and level-headedness, that America’s black community should conduct itself with responsibility, patience, industry, thrift, and usefulness. He held blacks to a higher standard than whites, urging them to be worthy representatives of their race.

His critics included W.E. Du Bois, the founder of the NAACP. “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission. …” He said, “[His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.”

While Washington believed that the road to equality was a long, hard one, needing to be planned carefully and executed over time, mostly through good race relations, Du Bois’ school of thought was more aggressive, he wanted to force instant equality through court victories and legislation.

Washington, it seems, held Du Bois’ theory in the same estimation as Du Bois held his:

“There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs….There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”

It should be noted that while advocating peace and understanding between the races, Washington secretly contributed to the coffers of several notable civil rights cases of the day.

One has to wonder what Dr. Washington would have thought about those six boys in jail in Louisiana.

He wouldn’t have liked that they got themselves kicked out of school, I can tell you that.

My take is that the original mishandling was in not expelling the white boys who hanged those nooses from the tree. That is hate, disgusting, raw hate, and, hey, here’s a thought – aren’t schools supposed to be institutions of learning? If you want to threaten and intimidate your fellow students, then guess what? You don’t get the privilege of an education. Too bad, zero tolerance, no second chances, you should have thought about your future before you decided to display your white-trash-cracker bigotry.

But guess what else? No boys would up swinging from that tree. None of them was hurt. I’ll tell you who was hurt – the white boy they beat the crap out of, six on one, who didn’t even hang the nooses. If they’d seen those nooses swaying in the breeze and immediately thereafter attacked the guys who hung them, they would have had a damn fine legal leg to stand on, and I would have supported them. But people don’t seem to realize that this isn’t the same thing, legally or ethically.

I think both Dr. Washington and Dr. King would have been livid (as lived as they ever got, anyway). This is not how you should represent your race. This is not the peaceful, dignified, non-violent protest that they advocated, this is something low and ugly. Dr. Washington said, “One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.” Dr. King said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

I’m disappointed that this is being built up in the media as the next wave of civil rights when it seems to me a step backwards in the tradition of the movement.

There’s this amazing musical called Ragtime, based on Doctorow’s eponymous novel, and Dr. Washington has a small role to set the historical context. While I know the following is a fictional quote, as far as I know not even based on anything he said, I feel this line the representation of Washington sings in the last half hour of the show sums up what his opinion of the situation in Jena would have been, and what I think of it.

“For the sum of my life I have lived in hope we might all be Christian brothers.I have worked to persuade every white skinned man that he need not fear our race – what has your selfish recklessness cost us? When I’ve worked so hard to steel the white man’s hate. Look what you’ve done……..And you dare to teach your lessons to these wild, unthinking youths, yet your own son you abandoned to be raised on white man’s truths. Look what you’ve done. Think of your son. Is the lesson you would bestow upon him? Are these the shoulders you would have him stand upon? Let him be the son of a man who had the courage to tell the truth in a court of law. Make your case, and if the verdict is death, go to it proudly, knowing that you have been heard. The truth is all. You do this and you will have the thanks and respect of every decent man of color and of all those children of our race whose way is hard and whose journey is long.”

There are a lot of tables in the Student Union of my community college, especially at the beginning of a new year. To the left of the door is a gentleman in fatigues, attempting to recruit me to the Army; to the right of the door is a lady in fatigues, trying to recruit me to the National Guard; by the back door is a woman in a crisp suit attempting to recruit me to the Bank of America. I have learned that it is best not to make eye contact with any of these people, lest they lavish you with gifts of free key chains, pencils, and checking accounts, all while asking you penetrating questions along the lines of, “Would you like to take a test to determine your eligibility to join our bank/army?”, (oddly, everyone seems to pass) and “Would you like our bank/army to pay for your college education? All we’d need is your soul!”

But never, in all my days, have I seen Mormons recruiting in the Student Union. Nor do I recall ever seeing a Mormon sitting still, usually they are best described in verbs: riding their bicycles, hassling me in the parking lot, etc.

But today, there they were.

I recall writing the other day that I try to know as much about the world’s religions as possible. In fact, to quote myself:

“…..my lack of any definitive religion makes it possible for me to see all religions without the filter of dogma. I take my irreligiousness not as a free ride to ignore the faith of those around me; on the contrary, I try to know as much about their doctrines and cultures as possible. I think that’s just being responsible.”

So, with that in mind, seeing the two sweet little blue-eyed-well-scrubbed Mormon girls sitting there, I decided to jump in headfirst.
I really got very excited (“Yes! Mormons!”), hung up on my mom, who I was talking to at the time, with what must have sounded like, to her, the phrase “gottagonowiseemormonsbye.”

As far as entertainment value and interesting belief systems go, I’m actually a huge fan of Mormons as they are portrayed on the HBO series Big Love, but I’m smart enough to know that this image probably isn’t very accurate. So, with some time to kill and some handy Mormons right there, I thought, why not ask?

I think I surprised them with my direct approach.

“So, would y’all like to tell me about Mormonism?”

They looked flustered for a second, as if thinking, wait, isn’t that our question? But they recovered well, and asked me what I wanted to know.

“Well, I just don’t know very much about it, and I was hoping you could tell me a bit.”

There was a time – I remember it well – when one could rely upon English and journalism majors to be reasonably literate.

Not so, evidently, these days, I concluded as I read my local university newspaper a few mornings ago. I read this because the one issuing from my community college is dreck (their worst transgression to date: “all the characters kept there clothes on…..”) and the regular grownup paper depresses me. (These people are purportedly college graduates. What’s their excuse?)

Scanning the police briefs (“Smoking male busted in dorm”, “No evidence, no underage drinking charge”, “Man threatens violence over broken cell phone”, etc.), obligatory two articles about professors receiving honors, obligatory article about drinking, seven to ten articles about college sports, and a “My View” column so convoluted that looking at it made my eyes hurt, I stumbled upon this little gem which I reproduce now exactly as it appeared:

Pirates of the Caribbean at world’s end – As the great Billy Joel once sang, “Captain Jack will get you high tonight.” Even though that was more about heroine than pirates….

If you noticed an error, you’re exactly right – there wasn’t a colon between the phrase ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ and ‘At World’s End’, which, as discriminating movie viewers, we all know should always separate a franchise and a subtitle, as in ‘Superman IV: The Quest for Peace’ or ‘Superman XXVII: The Quest for a Viable Script’.

But of course, I jest.

If you spotted the real error in that sentence, you do NOT get a cookie, because you should have gleaned the difference between, say, Joan of Arc (heroine) and a highly addictive opiate (heroin) simply from being alive.

You would think, too, that the average adult citizen would still be aware of the basic concept of Judaism, even if that understanding were blended with bigotry. You would be wrong.

Today was creation myth day in my humanities class, and the teacher – who happens to be Jewish, and in my estimation doing an excellent job of maintaining objectivity and intellectualism – compared the Judeo-Christian creation myth with the myths of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Hinduism. The Rig Veda, in this last category, is truly poetically beautiful:

“Then even nothingness was not nor existence,

there was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.

What covered it?

In whose keeping? Was there then cosmic water in the depths unfathomed?

Then there was neither death nor immortality

nor was there the torch of night and day.”

Anyway, the teacher mentioned in passing, the Old Testament. “Well, it’s the Old Testament to the Christians,” he amended, “but to the Hebrews, it’s just the Jewish Bible.” This guy in front of me raised his hand, and said, “So Jews reject the New Testament?” (more…)

When I ride the bus, I do so with a soundtrack, partly to make the scenes out the window seem like the opening credits of a movie, and partly to drown out the other people on the bus, who often sound like a particularly tacky episode of Dr. Phil (“Well, I’m on federal probation right now………I got lucky, the same people who adopted my son adopted my daughter…….”).

Jazz is perhaps the only truly American art form, rather like Mormonism is the only truly American religion – although I imagine that tap dancers will take me to task on the first count and Scientologists on the second.

Also, “jazz” is just a great word, incorporating both the letter J and the letter Z, which, if you’ve ever played the alphabet game on road trips, you know are two of the hardest letters to find.

So, a few days ago, in search of a soundtrack for my current bus ride, I clicked to Billie Holiday on my iPod. I love Lady Day, and have from the first time I heard “Strange Fruit” played on NPR on a Sunday afternoon (does anything beat Sunday afternoon jazz?) (more…)

I read. No, really, like, a lot. (as clearly evidenced by the verbosity of that last sentence.)

Copyright Notice

Basically, I have dibs on anything posted here, because it is M-I-N-E mine. I am very selfish about the things I write, in the sense that I do not want other people to take things I write and do things like pretend they wrote them. If you reproduce my stuff in any way without my express permission, then I will more or less hunt you down. Fair warning.

Awards and such

I came in behind this kid who can't spell

From the O'DonnnellWeb Blog Awards, I was honored with a 1st place award for “Best Unschooling Girl Blog Among the One Blog Entered”.

From Alasandra's blog, "Best Teen Blog"

I cherish this award: I awarded it to myself on behalf of "Consent of the Governed," where I hold the complex title of "incredibly rude," "condescending," "elitist," "unmedicated," "Godwin Police," "troll." I hold this title with pride.

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Comments Policy

I, PenguinDust, reserve the right to blatantly censor any comment with which I do not agree or whose tenor I do not appreciate.
This may be the United States of America; but this is my own small corner of it, so I'll run it my way, thank you.
Comment if you want, but you've been warned: if you write something mean-spirited, inexplicably unkind, or something that makes me afraid of the internet, that comment will - and oughta be - deleted. Also, I prefer not to publish comments that display poor grammar.

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782